Inspired by Journey to the Center of the Earth
Inspired by Journey to the Center of the Earth Science-Fiction
Oscar Wilde supposedly once remarked that H. G. Wells was a “scientific Jules Verne.” It is hard to determine which author Wilde wished to slight more, but it doesn’t really matter: Verne and Wells are the two progenitors of modern science fiction. Without these authors, science fantasy writing—a category that includes such notables as Kingsley Amis, Isaac Asimov, Anthony Burgess, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and J. R. R. Tolkien—would not exist as we know it today.
Herbert George Wells supported himself with teaching, textbook writing, and journalism until 1895, when he made his literary debut with The Time Machine, which was followed before the end of the century by The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds—books that established him as the first original voice in the realm of scientific fantasy since Verne. Where Verne dealt with scientific probabilities—for example, the Nautilus from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea serves as the forerunner to the modern submarine—time travel, interplanetary warfare, and invisibility and other fantasies are the subjects of Wells’s conceptual fiction.
Perhaps because of this fundamental difference in their artistic aims, Wells was famously loath to be compared to his literary ancestor. In a letter to J. L. Garvin, the editor of Outlook, Wells refused to attack Verne publicly, though he had openly denied having been influenced by the latter: “A good deal of injustice has been done the old man [Verne] in comparison with me. I don’t like the idea of muscling into the circle of attention about him with officious comments or opinions eulogy. I’ve let the time when I might have punished him decently go by.” Although the prolific Wells delved into social philosophy and criticism, history, utopian and comic novels, literary parodies, and even feminism, he was always best remembered for his auspicious beginnings as a science fiction writer.
The Underground Novel
Underground worlds have fascinated mankind for millennia—consider the Hades of the Greeks and the subterranean inferno of Dante—but Verne’s story is an important nineteenth-century manifestation. With Verne as a thematic predecessor, so-called Lost World and Lost Race novels took strong hold in the English-speaking world. In fact, Verne himself took inspiration from Journey to the Center of the Earth to write another underground tale, the little-known Les Indes Noires (1877), which chronicles a family living in a coal mine beneath the surface of Scotland. In English, the novel has been published under titles as various as Underground City, The Child of the Cavern, Strange Doings Underground, Black Diamonds, and the literal The Black Indies. The African adventure tales of British author H. Rider Haggard, including the treasure-hunt classic King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and the mystical She: A History of Adventure (1887), utilize the underground as a key setting and metaphor. Two of the best-selling fictions of their time, Haggard’s novels are still read today and also are known for helping inspire the Indiana Jones movie franchise of the 1980s. Lost World and Lost Race themes appear in works as wide-ranging as the science fiction of H. G. Wells, the anti-imperialism works of Joseph Conrad, the Professor Challenger novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Tarzan and Pellucidar series of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Film
The first adaptation of Verne’s novel, Voyage au centre de la terre (1909; A Journey to the Middle of the Earth), was by Spanish director Segundo de Chomon; no copies are known to exist today. By the middle of the twentieth century, though, film audiences were quite familiar with Verne. The Czech Cesta do Praveku ( 1955; Journey to the Beginning of Time), directed by Karel Zeman, was inspired by Verne’s novel, though this story of traveling to past epochs is not really an adaptation. That came in 1959 with Journey to the Center of the Earth. James Mason plays Professor Oliver Lindenbrook and a frequently shirtless Pat Boone sings musical numbers in his role as Alec McEwen, Lindenbrook’s student. Arlene Dahl is the strongwilled Carla Goetaborg, a role created for the movie. Director Henry Liven portrays realistic-looking dinosaurs with footage of lizards blown up to monstrous proportions, and the magnificent settings include crystal gardens, forests of giant mushrooms, and footage of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. Bernard Herrmann’s excellent score completes this classic. America also saw a wave of other Verne adaptations in the 1950s: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956) were popular hits, the latter winning an Academy Award for Best Picture.
An admirable Spanish adaptation, Viaje al centro de la Tierra, by director Georges Méliès (1976), appeared in the United States in 1978; it is sometimes known as Where Time Began and Fabulous Journey to the Center of the Earth. The creative opening sequence shows a pastiche of early, silent Verne films from prolific director Georges Méliès. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1989), featuring model-actress Kathy Ireland, takes little from Verne’s novel but the name; the same holds true for a 1993 television movie. A loosely adapted miniseries starring Treat Williams, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1999), moves the action to New Zealand and focuses on a dinosaur plot and a missing-person saga.
Director Gavin Scott’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (2005) depicts four young people who discover the original manuscript for Verne’s novel. When they find a map of Verne’s travels under the Earth’s surface, they realize that the author based the book on his real-life adventures and agree to go underground and follow Verne’s path. Part of this story rings true to actual events: Verne’s original manuscript for the novel, lost for decades, came to light in 1994.